What does it mean to sit with your feelings?

How to nurture your spirit round 2

Dear Friends-

In 2021, I found myself sitting for a virtual appointment with my “therapist.” Well, she’s not exactly a therapist. She is a somatics specialist, healer, and hypnotist (based in LA, of course), and we were sitting for our second session. (The first one would later change my life as she had described the same baby I’d had a dream about. Bennett of course matched this description as he grew older.)

At the time, I was exhausted and battling anxiety and depression. I was in the middle of a massive revision of Grief is Love, I was still sick from our pregnancy loss in 2019, Matt was on the frontlines of the pandemic setting up vaccination clinics, and we were in the midst of our adoption process. No matter how much rest I would get, I just couldn’t seem to shake the exhaustion or the heaviness in my chest. I was struggling on every front.

As much as I love facts, data, and statistics, I also love things that require you to abandon all of that type A, Harvard stuff and just go along for the ride. So I set up our guest room with a box of tissues and spoke to Lisa on Zoom (of course she had the same name as my dead mom). In our second session, she asked me to close my eyes and put my hands on my belly. “What do you feel?” she asked. Eyes closed, breathing deep, hands on my belly, was suddenly able to parse through my feelings. “I am angry,” I started. “So very angry. Madder than I’ve ever been in my life, at. . . my mom?! Wait, that can't be right. What the fuck is this?”

But as soon as I said it, as soon as I named it aloud, I felt the beginning of a shift. I was carrying around all of this anger at someone who’d been dead for over a decade. Someone who was by all accounts perfect in my eyes. So why the anger? As I wept over this, Lisa offered the classic therapist advice: that I sit with my anger and figure out how to process it.

We often hear wellness influencers, therapists, and others telling us to “sit with our emotions,” but what does that really mean and why does it matter? In Dorothy Hollinger’s book, The Anatomy of Grief, she reminds us that acknowledging and identifying our feelings, naming them, is the only thing that reduces their power over us. When we notice and name, the feeling begins to lift in the moment, and we’re able to move through the world in a more balanced way with space to actually process the feeling itself. We need to deeply understand how we feel in order to get what we need.

I was mad at my mom because she was dead, and therefore not around to support us during our pregnancy loss, adoption process, or all of the physical and emotional pain I was experiencing at the time. I was a kid who had a great mom who always showed up and now that kid was pissed. Naturally inclined toward the pen, I decided to write my mom a letter. I needed to get this anger out on paper. Once I did, I no longer felt that rage or that heaviness in my chest. The exhaustion started to lift almost immediately and I honestly felt much better. Turns out some of the woo-woo stuff has roots in science.

So what are some steps for when you can’t quite put your finger on what you’re feeling? Get quiet. Not silent about what’s knocking you off balance, but quiet enough to offer yourself a landscape for thought. In my case, it was a hypnotic/meditative therapy session. For you it might be a long run, a bath, listening to some music, or some time to write it out. You don’t have to literally “sit” with the feelings, you just need to quiet your mind enough to identify and name them so you can move through them with ease. You’ll be surprised at what emerges to fill up that space.

Tending to your emotions is essential if you want to show up fully–not just for yourself, but for others as well, especially in this weird and difficult time. That’s where we will head together next week: How to show up for someone else when they are in the thick of it.

I hope this helps you process whatever it is you’re feeling these days. Remember, feelings are normal; what is abnormal is thinking we can get away with ignoring them :)

xxMarisa